Shup
by dharmamonkey
Summary: After a fatal shooting, Booth talks to a fellow agent about the emotional experience of killing and reflects on his first kill.


**Shup**

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**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rated:** K+  
**Disclaimer:** I don't own jack. I am, however, interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply.

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**A/N:**_ The muse started chattering about Booth's first kill, and the circumstances under which he might talk about it. This is the result. Enjoy!_

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I took my seat at the bar and greeted the bartender with a quick jerk of my chin.

In the years since Sal started tending bar at the Founding Fathers, he'd seen me come in there at least a couple of times a week, and he was usually able to figure out what I wanted to drink depending on who I was sitting with: if I was with Cam, usually a double Dewars, neat; if I was there with Bones and the squints to celebrate the closing of a case, usually a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon; if it was just me and Bones by ourselves, I'd drink whatever she was having (except for while she was pregnant, when she drank club sodas with lime, in which case I reverted to my usual bottle of PBR); if I was with another FBI guy, then I'd follow his cue and drink whatever he was drinking.

Sean Szczepaniak was the newest member of my team. "Shup," as we called him (because his last name, pronounced "Shuh-pan-yak," had too many syllables and way the hell too many consonants for the boys in the bullpen to remember), was just six months out of Quantico where he'd finished at the top of his class. I was surprised when I learned he'd been assigned to my team in the Violent Crimes section of the D.C. field office, because the top graduates of the last couple of classes were assigned to the New York, Los Angeles or Chicago field offices. Shup was a good kid—twenty-eight years old, born and raised in Denver, with a degree in sociology from the University of Colorado that he put to use for a couple of years as a juvenile probation/parole officer in Pueblo before applying to the FBI—and he'd done well in the half-year he'd been working for me.

He looked tired, sitting there staring into his half-full pint glass of what looked like Bud Light from the pale straw color, and I saw him draw a long, deep breath before he finally turned to me.

"I'm sorry, sir," he began, his eyes blinking a couple of times as he looked away again. "I know it's stupid, but…"

Sal slid my pint across the bar with a faint, knowing smile and a wink, then quietly disappeared again to the opposite end of the bar. I pulled my beer towards me, studying it for a moment before I turned to Shup.

"It's not stupid," I picked up the glass and held it in front of my lips for a couple of seconds, then took a small sip and set it down again. "It's not stupid at all," I told him as I reached up and loosened my tie. "What you had to do and what you're having to deal with—it's the hardest stuff there is. The hardest part of this job, and the one part they don't prepare you for at Quantico."

Shup shrugged and sighed, then tipped his own glass back and gulped down a big mouthful, as if that 4.2% of octane in that Bud Light was going to somehow imbue him with a shot of extra courage he'd been lacking just seconds before. I watched him as he set his glass down with a clank and scratched the back of his head, unable to resist a smile at seeing how he'd finally let his hair grow out a little from the high-and-tight he'd had when he first reported to the Hoover for duty.

"I mean, it's weird, you know," he began. I was glad to see he'd dropped the _sir _and was going to talk to me like another Special Agent. I was, of course, his Supervisory Special Agent, but tonight, I was a friend, a listening ear. I'd go back to busting his balls in the morning. "You spend a lot of time at the Academy learning how to handle a weapon, deal with hostage situations—tactics and all that—so of course you know that at some point, you may be called on to…" Shup's voice trailed off and his blue eyes swiveled away as he reached for his beer, putting his fingers around the glass but not picking it up. "I know I'm supposed to be dealing with this better, but…"

"Who told you that?" I asked, instantly regretting the sharpness of my tone even though it was clear (I hoped) that I wasn't annoyed at him.

His eyes narrowed a little and he frowned. "Nobody, I guess," he said quietly. "I just…" He shrugged again and looked away, picking up his beer and draining the last quarter of a pint in a couple of big swallows, wincing a little as he slammed the glass on the bar harder than he'd expected to.

I turned and saw Sal standing a few feet away. Our eyes met and I indicated with a silent nod for him to bring Shup another Bud Light. I watched Sal pull the tap and fill a fresh glass, then turned back to Shup.

"Most agents will go their whole careers and never have to do what you did," I told him, observing him out of the corner of my eye as I rolled up my shirtsleeves. "And Sweets—God love him, okay? But he's never had to do what you did. It's not easy."

Shup had been put on desk duty for a week after the shooting, and had to complete three counseling sessions with Sweets before he was cleared to go back in the field. A month later, he was still struggling. I'd noticed his focus and attention to detail were a bit off, and he wasn't quite as punctual after coming back from desk duty as he'd been before. Sweets had asked me about Shup over lunch a few days earlier, about how he was doing. I dodged the question, preferring to talk to Shup myself before subjecting the kid to more of Sweets' well-intentioned but frequently unhelpful shrinkery.

I stared into my own beer for a minute before I was shaken out of my thoughts by Sal delivering Shup's fresh pint.

"No," I sighed. "It's not easy at all. It wasn't easy for me, the first time." I felt a knot hardening in my throat and tried to swallow it away, but to no avail, so instead I picked up my beer and tried washing it down as my words hung in the air between us. I thought about it for a second, then sighed again and said, my voice probably little more than a whisper, "It still isn't."

Shup's red eyebrows flew up and he just stared at me. "What do you mean?" he asked after a moment, raking his hand through his hair nervously as he cringed a little, probably wondering if he'd made some kind of mistake by asking the question. "I mean, I know you were…" He suddenly pursed his lips and his cheeks flushed. I knew the guys in the bullpen gossiped about me—hell, it's what guys do in the bullpen when they're not razzing each other or, God forbid, working—and I knew that, at some point in the six months since Shup joined the team, one of the guys must have told him about my background as a Ranger and a sniper.

"Yeah," I said, leaning into the bar as I took a long sip of beer and began to speak. "Mine…my first…was Sunday, February 24th, 1991."

Suddenly, it was as if everyone in the bar had hushed, and it was just me and Shup sitting there. That's how it seemed, anyway, as the memory of that time came to me in a big, gut-swirling rush that made the sound of conversations around us seem to fall away. In its place, all I could hear was the dull roaring of blood in my ears that reminded me of hearing helicopter rotors beating overhead as I sat in that Blackhawk with my sniper rifle between my legs, a fully-loaded ALICE rucksack strapped to my back and ammunition, canteen and other gear hanging from the vest in the front as we approached the insertion point.

"My unit—3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division—moved into Iraq with the first wave when the ground war began," I explained. "Our job was to go in that first day and cut off the lines of communication between Baghdad and the Kuwaiti theater of operations, then secure the low-water crossings over the Euphrates. We went in on choppers and air-assaulted into Iraq at 0700 that first day and by sundown that night, we'd pushed 170 miles into Iraq and cut that main road, Highway 8, which was the main artery connecting Baghdad to Kuwait. Three hundred helicopter sorties made that push—that invasion by the 101st—the largest helicopter air assault in history."

I couldn't help but grin with pride, and was glad to see Shup smile back, the first such smile I'd seen from him in a week. My unit, the 187th, went deeper into Iraq than any other American unit did during Desert Storm. It wasn't until the invasion of Iraq in 2003 that an American military outfit probed deeper than we did that February 1991.

"Wow," Shup said, his murmur silenced as he tipped back his glass.

"Yeah," I said with a soft shrug. I tried again to wash down the knot in my throat with a big gulp of beer, then took a deep breath and continued. "There was a firefight," I said. "When we air-assaulted in with that first wave, we pretty quickly met with stiff resistance. An Iraqi unit, the 1st Battalion, 82nd Brigade of Iraq's 49th Infantry Division, was dug in near an area we'd designated as a supply route. We had to clear 'em out. The firefight was pretty intense, because we were the first unit to penetrate that far and so they hadn't been softened up at all by contact with other Allied units."

I remember that morning as clearly as if it were yesterday.

_"Son of a bitch!" I heard First Sergeant Harper holler as bits of sand and rock splashed over the hump of dirt that served as our defilade. He ducked down, his hand cupping the top of his Kevlar helmet as he hugged his M16 against the side of his leg. "Booth!" he yelled._

_"Yeah, Top!" I yelled back, my voice largely drowned out by the whistling of small arms fire zipping over our heads and the heavy clatter of a 12.7mm Soviet-made NSV machine gun hammering away at us from downrange. _

_"Booth, you and Parker better get off your asses and shut that fucking thing down," he said to me, spitting a wad of tobacco juice into the sand as I scrambled a few feet closer where a divot shot loose from the top of the embankment allowed me a brief look at the heavy machine gun that had pinned down C. Co, 1st Platoon. I glanced at the little divot once more, then whistled for Parker, who was a few feet to my right, to scoot on over._

_"Okay, Top," I shouted, sliding to the left to make room for Parker. "Can you get somebody to drop a mortar or two over there? Maybe just to give us enough time to set up a clear shot and take out the crew..."_

_Harper shot me a dark scowl. "We've got no more mortar rounds left in this position," he said grimly. The platoon's mortar squad had used up all of their ammunition trying to take out the other heavy machine gun position downrange, which had been situated where the earthen embankment we were hiding behind provided less cover. The second machine gun couldn't reach us, but its presence hindered our advance. If Parker and I couldn't take down its crew and silence it long enough to enable some of the other guys in the platoon to move to outflank that Iraqi unit on the other side of the irrigation canal, all of Charlie Company was going to be in a world of hurt. _

_I didn't reply, but just nodded soberly as Parker and I moved into position. As I was studying the little divot that was going to be the aperture that would let us take our shot behind partial cover, another long round of 12.7mm fire came our way, making us all duck and hug the dirt for a minute as more sand and stones rained over us. I glanced up and saw that the latest burst had punched open another aperture, a slightly bigger one. The moment the NSV fell silent—because the crew had to change out the box of ammunition and its barrel—Parker and I set up the shot. Parker took a quick look through the rangefinder._

_"Two hundred ninety meters," he said to me. At three hundred meters, a 150-grain .308 round will drop 6.7 inches, so I did a bit of very quick mental math and adjusted accordingly. I steadied my breath and gently settled my fingertip over the trigger. "Okay, barrel's out," he said quickly. "Send it."_

_I let my breath flow out of me, focusing on my diaphragm as I exhaled slowly and watched the olive-green figure in the distance hunch over the machine gun, his hands gripping the hot barrel with asbestos-lined gloves as he pulled it out. I couldn't see his eyes, but I saw the line of his jaw, lightly dusted with a thin black beard as it arced over the curve of his slender neck. He pushed his helmet back, exposing his forehead as he wiped the sweat away with the back of his wrist. I slowed my breath for a fraction of a second, just long enough to still every muscle in my body except for the ones I needed to squeeze that trigger, then narrowed my gaze ever so slightly as I pulled the trigger and took the shot. Although I'd taken thousands and thousands of such shots on the practice range, first at Fort Benning when I was at Sniper School, and then later at Fort Campbell before the 187th deployed to Saudi Arabia for Desert Shield, but this time, it felt different. The rifle's recoil, for the some reason, seemed harder, more jarring. I didn't see where my round landed, but knew it had met its mark._

_"Got it," Parker said, using the neutral terminology we'd decided on between us. "See the second one?"_

_"Yeah," I replied with a grunt, trying to will away the throb of my racing heart as I settled my breath and my gaze behind the scope. A second Iraqi came into view holding a fresh machine gun barrel before he stopped and saw his comrade crumpled behind the gun's tripod. _

_"Two-ninety-five," my spotter said. "Ready?" I grunted in reply. "Do it."_

_A second loud crack filled my ears as I took the second shot, and dropped the second Iraqi soldier. I felt my heart race as a dizzying wave of excitement and strangeness washed over me. My ears were still ringing from the report of my rifle when I heard a murmur as First Sergeant Harper said something to me, then I saw a flurry of activity and movement to my left as half the men of 1st Platoon surged over the top of the defilade while the other half stood up from behind the berm to lay down covering fire. _

"Two," Shup said evenly, his voice not peaking quite enough to come across as a question.

"Yes," I told him. "My first and second…" My voice trailed off and I swallowed, then nodded to myself. I came there that night knowing we'd be having that conversation and that I'd tell him that story. Still, it was never easy to talk about what I'd done or the lives I'd taken, which was in large part the point I had wanted to make. In any case, I pressed on. "My first and second kills were that morning—that first morning we went into Iraq. I had four more before I was captured three days later by the Republican Guard.

Shup sat there for a minute in silence, his fingers wrapped around his pint glass. I could tell from the way his blue eyes shifted from side to side that he was thinking, and for a few moments, I left him to his thoughts before I spoke again.

"It never gets easier," I told him. "Not the second time. Not the third time. Not the thirtieth time." Shup blinked at that, unable to hide his surprise at hearing me admit I'd taken the lives of thirty men. Of course, the reality is that I've taken the lives of a lot more than that. Hell, I had fifty-three ugly red marks on what Bones calls my _"cosmic balance sheet"_ before my boots ever hit the ground in Afghanistan, and by the time I got back stateside, I'd added another twenty-five.

Shup reached up and ruffled his red hair, then looked up at the ceiling for a few seconds and sighed, then looked down again, settling his gaze on the smooth, burnished wood of the bar. "So you're saying I'm always gonna feel like this?" he asked me. "I mean, 'cause I don't know…"

I shook my head and placed my hand on the bar, just a couple of inches away from his beer glass. The thick white gold band on my finger flashed under the fancy lights overhead and I felt a tiny pulse of warmth in my chest as I remembered the day Bones put it on my finger. She was my strength. Without her, I'm not sure how I'd have managed these last nine years, especially after the dust settled and, eight or nine months after I got back from Afghanistan—not long after she and I got together, actually—I started having nightmares about things that happened to me over there, and in Iraq, and Kosovo, and Somalia, and the dozen other shit-holes I'd been to where I'd killed and seen men killed. I drummed my fingers on the bar and looked over at Shup's left hand. He wore a wedding band, too. I'd met his wife once, at an FBI family picnic a couple of months before the shooting. She was a couple of years older than he was, a schoolteacher by trade, and I remember the sparkle in her eye that left little doubt in my mind of how proud of him she was.

"No," I said. "That's not what I mean. What I mean is, it'll get better." I saw his arched eyebrows relax as he exhaled a sigh of relief. "It'll never go away completely, Shup, but it'll get better. You learn to accept what you've done, you know, and make peace with it. That part gets better." I fell silent for a moment and thought about the last time I took a life and the strange mix of feelings I felt seeing Pelant laying there on the floor, a pool of dark crimson spreading out beneath his shattered temple. "Even the ones who deserve it the most, you know—the ones who most have it coming to them—it still isn't easy. It still…" I hesitated for a second as I thought about what it had felt like to take down the man who'd taken so many lives, and who had caused so much suffering for the sake of his own sick amusement. "Even then, Shup, even then it's not easy. Taking a life is always hard. It always marks you."

His dark red brows knit low over his pale blue eyes and he frowned, but said nothing. I thought about how it all finally hit me as I was sitting on the floor of that Blackhawk, mindlessly stroking the soft fuzz on the side of my dead spotter's head as he lay there, his body not yet cold as the helicopter banked gently to the right and took us away from the wadi where we'd been extracted. By that point in the invasion, I'd had four kills: the two that first day, another the second day, and a third just moments after the target (a Republican Guard sniper) took the shot that killed Teddy. Sitting there with that fourth kill fresh in my mind as I recoiled against the idea that my comrade, my friend, was dead, it hit me. The man I'd killed that night—and the men I'd killed in the days prior—were, in a way, little different than Teddy. Each one was some mother's son. They, too, were soldiers, ordinary men whose lives were cut short as quickly as Teddy's had been.

"Shup," I said, cocking my head to one side as he slowly brought his eyes to meet mine. "What I'm saying is…the way you feel right now? It's normal. It's expected. The way it hurts right now…it'll get better. It'll fade. But there's nothing wrong with you for feeling this way. I've taken many, many more lives than you ever will, Shup, and each time I do, I feel the way you're feeling." I saw how those pale eyes of his glimmered and felt a clenching in my gut as I wondered how it had been for him to sit in Sweets' office on that couch being counseled about killing by a man who had never taken a life. "Look," I said. "No matter what anyone else tells you, okay? It's tough. Whether the guy you kill is a monster or…you know, just a regular guy in the wrong place at the wrong time…taking a life leaves a mark on you. Bearing that burden is part of what guys like us sometimes have to do. The way you're feeling now? It's the price we pay. But you'll be okay."

I clapped him gently on the shoulder and gave him an encouraging look.

"Okay?"

He pressed his lips together in a firm, hard line and thought for a second, then sighed sharply and nodded.

"Yeah," he said, reaching for his beer. "I'll be okay."

I smiled and gave his shoulder a soft squeeze.

"I know you will."

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**A/N: **_I'm not sure how many "Booth's first kill" stories have been written. This is mine. This is, you'll note, the only story I've written thus far to hint at the events of Season 9._

_I know it wasn't much, but I hope you still enjoyed it. _

_Please, share your thoughts as I've shared mine. Let me know what you thought of this and leave a review. _

_In any case, thanks for reading._

**Shameless plug for other projects: **_For those who have been following the Dharmasera crossover saga, the latest chapter of "Hand to Hand" (the 9th and last story in the series) is now up. Go check it out at my coauthor _**Lesera128**_'s profile. _


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